Mother (2009)
Directed by: Joon-ho
Bong.
Written by: Joon-ho
Bong and Eun-kyo Park & Joon-ho Bong.
Starring: Hye-ja Kim (Mother), Won
Bin (Yoon Do-joon), Goo Jin (Jin-tae), Je-mun Yun (Je-moon), Mi-seon Jeon (Mi-sun),
Sae-byeok Song (Sepaktakraw Detective), Woo-hee Chun (Mi-na), Gin-goo Kim (Ah-jeong's
Grandma), Moo-yeong Yeo (Lawyer Kong Seok-ho), Hee-ra Mun (Moon Ah-jeong), Mi-do
Lee (Hyung-teo), Young-ki Jung (Kkang-ma), Gyu-pil Go (Ddung-ddung), Hong-jib
Kim (Jong-pal), Kyung-Sook Cho (Mi-na's Mama), Myung-shin Park (Chief), Tae-won
Kim (Young Do-jun).
You think
you know where Joon-ho Bong’s Mother is going – and you are almost certainly
going to be wrong. After a few establishing scenes, where we get to know
Do-joon (Won Bin) – a mental with some mental difficulties, and his devoted
mother (Kim Hye-ja), who is never given a name other than Mother – we find out
a murder has been committed. The murder is that of a teenage girl – whose head
was bashed in, before she was put on display for the whole small town to see. There
are a few clues that point to Do-joon, and the it doesn’t take the cops long to
get a “confession” out of him for the murder – although it’s clear he doesn’t
really understand what is going on, and he is thrown in jail awaiting trial.
The cops are convinced they have the right man – or at least don’t care enough
to look any harder, the high priced lawyer she has hired (and cannot afford)
doesn’t much care, and no one else does either. Therefore, it’s up to mother to
get to the bottom of the case – to prove her son’s innocence.
That
probably sounds like a fairly typical setup for a thriller. And you could
easily make a conventional thriller out of the material. Those opening scenes
of the cops interrogating Do-joon will no doubt remind you of the early scenes
in another Bong Joon-ho film – Memories of Murder – where it was clear the cops
didn’t really care if they caught the right person, so long as they got someone
to confess, so they could close the case and move on. And yet, like Memories of
Murder, Mother doesn’t go where you expect it to go. It starts as a mystery,
and deepens into a character study of Mother.
Kim
Hye-ja gives a truly great performance in the lead role. When the film begins,
you think she is the typical, overbearing, overprotective mother – and yet,
with her you understand it more. Do-joon may be an adult, but he has the mental
capacity of a child – and has fallen in with a bad crowd – notably Jin-tae (Goo
Jin) a low level criminal and con artist, who uses Do-joon in his schemes. Of
course she worries about it – look what happens when she isn’t there to protect
him. But slowly, her character deepens – and her motivations for doing so much
for Do-joon become more complicated. It isn’t just motherly love and devotion –
it’s a deep sense of guilt and shame. Bong even reveals what in other films may
have been a final scene twist at the half way point – and then allows the film
to get darker from there. The darkness isn’t just about Mother – but about
society in general – the cell phone of the victim becomes a key piece of
evidence, that shows things we’d rather not think about. Jin Tae re-enters the
picture, full of violence and rage. And Mother finds she can do a lot of things
she didn’t think she could.
By the
time we get to the end of the movie, everything has been turned on its head –
and no matter what, nothing can be the same again. Both Mother and Do-joon know
too much about each other, and have shown that dark side, to each other. And
yet, of course, Mother is still there protecting Do-joon – even when he becomes
somewhat cruel to her, rubbing her nose in what he no knows that she wishes he
didn’t. But the love may no longer be there.
Mother is
a complicated film. It looks and acts like a thriller – a procedural, in which
an unlikely detective follows one clue after another, hoping to put them all
into place. But ultimately, Bong isn’t as interested in that as he seems. The
film has answers to all your questions – it resolves everything. It’s just that
by the time it supplies them, you care about so much more than those simple
answers. It’s what makes Mother so a powerful, complex film.
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